By JENNIFER RABIN
In this month’s group show at PDX Contemporary, I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees, a tangled piece of black cord hangs on a wall opposite two white ceramic elephants, encrusted with gold roses, that sit atop a pedestal. 3D pieces in various media fill the gallery with no discernible relationship to one another. My experience was similarly decontextualized when I went to see A Marginal Tic at Fourteen30 Contemporary, where a curiously naïve vessel was shown alongside dripping abstract sculptures and paintings on linen. No information was provided, in either gallery, about the work itself or why the pieces were grouped together. I left both exhibitions scratching my head, without any connection to the work at all.
I am an arts writer, so I can easily write eight hundred words about the rhythm and texture and use of negative space of a tangled piece of cord or an abstract ceramic form. But a formal understanding of a piece of art won’t make me care about it. And I really want to care.
The problem is not unique to these two galleries. It’s a holdover from the white box philosophy of modernism. But in the 21st century, when a gallery presents work without providing information about it, it feels like a hostile act, because the purpose of art has always been to communicate. When a gallery goes out of its way to be opaque, we should ask ourselves why.